Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 2002-1960 (Patent Document 1) describes a technique by which an interval between consecutively arranged charged particles is widened without lowering a printing speed to reduce the effect of Coulomb repulsion of electric charges, thereby reducing print distortions.
Specifically, according to the technique, in an ink jet recording device that forms print characters out of dots of ink particles, vertically arranged dot data composed of columns of dots along the direction of deflection of ink particles is grasped column by column. Based on the vertically arranged dot data, with regard to dots of ink particles jet out of a nozzle for each column of dot data, the number of dots used for printing is calculated and whether any set of dots used for printing are charged consecutively is determined. When consecutively charged dots, that is, dots charged in succession, are present, a dot not used for printing that is included in the same column including the consecutively charged dots is interposed between the consecutively charged dots.
Another technique related to an ink jet recording device is also known that is to adjust timing of applying a charge voltage to ink particles, according to that technique, a charge voltage with a shifted phase is applied to non-printing particles and based on charge amount information of the non-printing particles to which such a charge voltage is applied, the optimum timing of efficiently charging ink particles is determined.